Adriaan EECKELS
Represented by: GLUON
Biography
Adriaan Eeckels (1960) is a historian, humanist and semiotician. Since his university years, he has been testing boundaries, also between art and science. As a thesis proposal, he investigated the epistemological properties of the narrative in historical research, by applying semiotics in historical research with a focus on the history of mentalities in Quattrocento Florence.
He describes himself as an intellectual vagabond and pontifex minimus traveling along borders and interstices of various disciplines, with a great interest in knowledge acquisition and the history of sciences. Most of his career has taken place in the European Institutions: from the Schengen Secretariat, through the European Court of Justice to the European Commission, in Luxembourg, Brussels and Ispra, Italy. He has carried out important projects in Document and Quality Management. Since 2016 he is leading the SciArt project of the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission.
The SciArt project brings together art and science in a venturesome interpretation, aiming at transcending supposed conflicts or accidental estrangements between the two disciplines. It experiments with artistic residencies in the JRC, creating temporary chambres d'amis that are also safe rooms for scientists, in an effective democracy of disciplines. The results of these experiments, in which artists and scientists work shoulder to shoulder, are exhibited during the biennial Resonances Festival, held in Ispra, Italy and then moving on to be shown in major European museums.
